REAL-TIME FORECASTING.

This chapter focuses upon real-time hydrological forecasting, and the mathematical apparatus necessary to carry out such forecasting. To successfully design real-time forecasting models, one requires an in-depth understanding of both hydrology and statistics. The chapter emphasizes the statistical and systems theory aspects of forecasting since the rest of this book emphasizes the hydrological aspects. Three aspects are crucial to successful forecasting One is the importance of representing the hydrological model within the feedback structure of a state vector model. This leads us to the second aspect of the chapter - the importance of data collection to model and parameter identification. The third part of this chapter presents a number of useful algorithms for estimating the parameters from noisy data. Refs.